Students: New buildings, ideas take Joplin schools into 21st century

May 20, 2012

Zack Wages, right, and Matthew O'Dell take notes in their AP Statistics class at Joplin High School on Tuesday, May 8, 2012. The open classroom design at the temporary high school will be incorporated into the design of the new building. / Valerie Mosley/News-Leader

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Want to go?

Joplin Schools is rebuilding after the May 22 tornado. On Tuesday, the one-year anniversary of the storm, a series of groundbreaking ceremonies have been scheduled. The public is invited to attend: • 10:30 a.m. — Irving Elementary, 2727 McClelland. This school will serve both Irving and Emerson elementary students. • Noon — East Middle School and elementary school at East, 4594 East 20th Street. This school will also serve both Duquesne and Duenweg elementary students. • 3:30 p.m. — Joplin High School and Franklin Technology Center, 2401 Indiana. This will be part of the City of Joplin’s Walk of Unity.

Open house

The public is invited to attend an open house at the temporary Joplin High School campus for grades 11-12. About 1,000 students go to class in a converted section of the Northpark Mall. Tours are available from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. today.

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JOPLIN — As a result of the tornado, the Joplin school district has re-imagined the way school buildings will look and the way students will learn.

A wider array of technology, fewer textbooks and more open classroom space will be priorities, especially at the high school level, as the district starts its rebuilding process.

“How often do you really get to create a vision for what teaching and learning should look like and then build a box around it? That’s what we’re doing right now,” said Superintendent C.J. Huff. “Usually, you have the school first and you try and fit the vision for teaching and learning inside that school, in its existing box, and that’s a real challenge.”

Ten of the 20 school buildings in the 7,500-student district were damaged or destroyed on May 22. Two elementary schools, a middle school, Joplin High School and the Franklin Technology Center were among the total losses.

Seven students and a staff member were among the 161 killed but the impact on the school community was widespread. More than 3,000 students lived in the path of the storm and about 4,200 were left without a school building to attend.

“If we didn’t do something better, we really wouldn’t be honoring their legacy or doing the right thing on our part,” said Huff said. “I couldn’t look myself in the mirror if I knew we just went back to the way it was before or used the storm as an excuse not to try and build back better.”

Voters approved a $62 million bond issue in April to complete more than $180 million in building projects and repairs. The rest is expected to come from insurance, donations and government funding.

“The opportunity was there to create a better quality educational system for our kids,” he said.

The district looked for space in existing buildings but it was limited so about 3,200 students are currently attending classes in temporary facilities, including a warehouse and an empty section of the Northpark Mall.

A string of major school construction projects will break ground Tuesday with the goal of returning students to permanent facilities by the start of the 2014-15 year.

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The new buildings will be fully updated, equipped with storm shelters and wired for the latest technology.

District officials also spent months reviewing research, studying “best practices” from around the U.S. and taking note of interesting spaces in the temporary school buildings.

For example, the mall space — where 1,000 students in grades 11-12 spent this school year — had wide hallways, open spaces and more of a “college and corporate feel,” said Joplin High Principal Kerry Sachetta.

“When it came to the design, we decided exactly what kind of ideas worked here and we used them for there,” he said.

Transforming the former department store into a high school building meant creating multiple “double classrooms” that can be separated by a partition door and glass-enclosed “think tank” rooms for student projects. Both ideas will be included in the new high school.

Sachetta said the open space works well for developing “21st century skills” including more project-oriented work, technology and interactive resources.

Other changes, prompted by necessity, have also worked out. The high school lost its textbooks and classroom materials in the storm and only purchased books for a handful of courses, mostly dual credit and Advanced Placement, this year.

Teachers had access to online textbooks but were encouraged to develop other resources, including more original sources or online guides, for their lessons. The library has relied more heavily on electronic books.

“When you don’t have anything to start the year off with, you have to get creative,” Sachetta said. “We’re going to see more of that.”